Jenna Glass sat in the knee-high grass and watched her metallic silver balloon float into the sunset Monday, June 15. It has been a year since her big-hearted aunt, Stacey Parkerson, was hit and killed by a vehicle while walking alongside Sydney Road.
The family gathered at the accident site just several houses down the road from their home to release balloons near an overgrown strawberry field.
As the family and Parkerson’s friends gathered in a circle to hold hands, they remembered the best things about her. She loved kids, dressing up in funny costumes and giving back to her community. She volunteered at Metropolitan Ministries.
It is this history of service that has stuck in the mind of Jenna. Just in time for the one-year anniversary of Parkerson’s death, Jenna has completed her own service project at her school, Turkey Creek Middle.
Jenna spearheaded a fundraising effort to raise money for backpacks for foster care children for the Luggage for Love program. When the children are taken away from their homes, they are only given a trash bag to collect their belongings in. When Jenna heard this, she wanted to help.
“I want to be a foster family,” Jenna said. “I feel bad for people who don’t have a home. Some stories are really sad.”
Jenna went to her principal a month before school let out to see if she could collect money on campus. She found a teacher sponsor, Mary Davis, and then recruited her friends and classmates to help.
One of those friends was Savanah Wyatt. She stayed after school with Jenna and the others to make special mason jars covered in burlap ribbon and inspirational quotes for every classroom for students to drop donations in. They also made posters for every home room door.
“It was fun,” Savanah said. “The outcome of it was for good cause.”
The team didn’t think they would raise more than $100 for the backpacks. The students ended up raising $300 in two weeks.
Jenna and Savanah left their eighth-grade dance Friday, June 5, to give the check and five backpacks donated from front office staff to family friend Shirley Chamberlain. Chamberlain works with the Friends in the Park homeless dinner feeding program at Veterans’ Monument Memorial Park. She was the one to tell the Glass family about the Luggage for Love.
“Over the years, I have seen foster children ripped from their families, sent to a strange home totally bewildered and showing up on those front steps with a black garbage bag holding their few belongings, probably feeling like the garbage those bags must represent,” Chamberlain said. “We adults know that they’re not, but a child can only try piecing together in their own mind, and more often than not anything that happens to them they will blame themselves. Those black garbage bags must be the ultimate humiliation for them.”
Chamberlain also worked with Parkerson at Metropolitan Ministries.
“It comes full circle for Jenna that she can give back, and it’s also the year anniversary of Stacey’s death,” Chamberlain said.
Like Parkerson, Jenna has a passion for volunteering. She averaged 400 community service hours every year she was in middle school. One of her other major projects is volunteering at Christmas Lane.
As she squinted at the last glimpse of the balloon before it floated over the trees, she knows she will continue her service at the high school level and leave a legacy much like Parkerson’s.
“I just think about the idea of helping,” Jenna said. “There’s a lot of people who don’t have anything. It makes you feel like a great person because you’re giving to someone who has nothing.”
Contact Amber Jurgensen at ajurgensen@plantcityobserver.com.
